Information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions in emotion expressions

Abstract

This paper explores the interaction between emotions and two types of questions, namely information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions. Corpus data shows that rhetorical questions (60.3%) are more frequently used in social media than information-seeking questions (39.7%). Of the two types of questions, approximately 94% of rhetorical questions are used to express emotions, while only 23% of information-seeking questions contain emotions. Given that rhetorical questions do play an important role in emotion expressions, we examine the interaction between rhetorical questions and emotions in terms of question type. Various syntactic structures are proposed for the identification of different emotions. We believe that the linguistic account of different types of rhetorical questions in emotion expressions will paint a fuller picture of the nature of emotion.